front cover of Computer Game Worlds
Computer Game Worlds
Claus Pias
Diaphanes, 2017
Computer games have become ubiquitous in today’s society. Many scholars have speculated on the reasons for their massive success. Yet we haven’t considered the most basic questions: Why do computer games exist? What specific circumstances led to the creation of this entirely new type of game? What sorts of knowledge facilitated the requisite technological and institutional transformations?

With Computer Game Worlds, Claus Pias sets out to answer these questions. Tracing computer games from their earliest forms to the unstoppable commercial and cultural phenomena they have become today, Pias then provides a careful epistemological reconstruction of the process of playing games, both at computers and by computers themselves. The book makes a valuable theoretical contribution to the ongoing discussion about computer games.

 
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front cover of Social Media-New Masses
Social Media-New Masses
Edited by Inge Baxmann, Timon Beyes, and Claus Pias
Diaphanes, 2016
Mass gatherings are at the center of contemporary discussions about community formation, communication, and social control. As new digital technologies and social media platforms have emerged, the concept of the mass gathering has evolved in parallel to take account of the different ways masses and crowds may form, including digital masses like flash mobs and protest groups. At the same time, these new digital masses provide a remarkable opportunity to reevaluate the broader historiographical framework surrounding mass gatherings.
           
With Social Media—New Masses, Inge Baxmann, Timon Beyes, and Claus Pias have brought together a diverse group of sociologists, media and cultural studies theorists, and historians of knowledge and technology who, together, outline the contours of this expanding field of research and analyze the differences between the old and new conceptions of masses and the distinct conditions and political consequences for each. Contributors to the volume include Marie-Luise Angerer, Dirk Baecker, Christian Borch, Christoph Engemann, Charles Ess, Wolfgang Hagen, Peter Krapp, Mirko Tobias Schäfer, and Sebastian Vehlken.
 
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front cover of Vampyroteuthis Infernalis
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis
A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste
Vilém Flusser
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

How far apart are humans from animals—even the “vampire squid from hell”? Playing the scientist/philosopher/provocateur, Vilém Flusser uses this question as a springboard to dive into a literal and a philosophical ocean. “The abyss that separates us” from the vampire squid (or vampire octopus, perhaps, since Vampyroteuthis infernalis inhabits its own phylogenetic order somewhere between the two) “is incomparably smaller than that which separates us from extraterrestrial life, as imagined in science fiction and sought by astrobiologists,” Flusser notes at the outset of the expedition.

Part scientific treatise, part spoof, part philosophical discourse, part fable, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis gives its author ample room to ruminate on human—and nonhuman—life. Considering the human condition along with the vampire squid/octopus condition seems appropriate because “we are both products of an absurd coincidence . . . we are poorly programmed beings full of defects,” Flusser writes. Among other things, “we are both banished from much of life’s domain: it into the abyss, we onto the surfaces of the continents. We have both lost our original home, the beach, and we both live in constrained conditions.”

Thinking afresh about the life of an “other”—as different from ourselves as the vampire squid/octopus—complicates the linkages between animality and embodiment. Odd, and strangely compelling, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis offers up a unique posthumanist philosophical understanding of phenomenology and opens the way for a non-philosophy of life.

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